486283 - Very bad way to store settings & preferencies - losing data

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 339805

(Thunderbird :: Preferences, defect)

Description

[Zdenek Kabelac]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.1b3) Gecko/20090327 Fedora/3.1-0.11.beta3.fc11 Firefox/3.1b3
Build Identifier: 

When I've been doing some tests that were filling disk to 100%  (i.e. dd /dev/zero file)   Thunderbird basically damaged its own configuration files completely. That's IMHO very bad - it should try to safe files first separately - and once it knows files are successfully stored on this - it should rename them to replace original files. That way I would not loose my data stored in preferencies.

I would STRONGLY recommend to read following paper - so it would be clear how the storage of such files should be properly handled:

http://www.flamingspork.com/talks/2007/06/eat_my_data.odp


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.fill disk to 100% with dd command
2.see what kind of file are left by thunderbird which trie to store its data during this time
3.
Actual Results:  
Zero length or damaged configuration files are left in .thunderbird directory - especially for news setting this is really painful - I'm considering this as a major bug which is pretty annoying as I would expect this kind of bugs in some pre release beta 0.1, but surely not in 3rd version.


Expected Results:  
Last successfully stored config files are left untouched. Thunderbird  opens dialog informing me there is disk storage problem - and awaits the user reaction - i.e. freeing disk space, stopping storing data on disk...
 

I'm running thunderbird-3.0-2.1.beta2.fc11.x86_64